liamvhogan

liamvhogan, 1 hour ago

@ausfestivus how will you share files without email though

liamvhogan, 1 hour ago

@geordie @ausfestivus all my external clients are on teams are they? Also which of the 3x logins to Teams I have should I use

liamvhogan, 1 hour ago

@jimbob @geordie @ausfestivus seriously though the thing I don’t like about Teams is that you can’t leave things unread to act as a proxy to-do list

liamvhogan, 1 hour ago

@jpm @jimbob @geordie @ausfestivus can you put this on Aconex

liamvhogan, 5 hours ago

@trib @Kels_316 @franksting that’s hot

liamvhogan, 6 hours ago

Just once I’d like to see someone propose to take a California Bungalow in one of these places and reinstate its full Eighties Ethnic Palace characteristics. Concrete lions, front yard vegetable patch, pebblecrete, the lot. I’m convinced it would come up to Burra Charter standards if you did it right (and the house had actually had that treatment in the past) but the neighbours and the Council and NSW Heritage would have a fit

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

It is absolutely true that there’s no ‘market’ solution to housing shortage but the irony is that simply increasing rent assistance—while it seems directive—is exactly a market-based solution, as opposed to more directive ones, that involve the State intervening in the housing market. People see it as advantaging ‘developers’, when it’s the other way around.

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

What doesn’t exist at the moment anywhere in Australia is a viable market for developers to build low-cost housing. So obviously, they don’t. Nor do Governments simply build, because spending public money on loss-making schemes to the benefit of future private landlords (if sold), or creating a spiralling maintenance burden to the public (if retained), doesn’t make sense for anyone.

So a low-cost housing market can only be created by the State. Ironies!

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

But there’s one part of the housing market where the Commonwealth really does have a big lever to pull and that’s retirement and inheritance. It should be difficult and expensive for property to be a retirement investment, and easier for super funds and SMSFs to invest in almost anything else. And it should be extraordinarily expensive to inherit housing.

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

The ideology of Australian property-ism is that rent is ‘dead money’, wasted, the reason everyone should borrow and own. In one sense it’s just class operating, denigrating renters as a group.

In a greater sense though it’s true: all rents are economically wasteful, and add nothing to the common good, and better nobody’s life. Rents moreover are taxes, private ones, paid to a collector given authority by law, landlords. The notion that excessive taxes are a burden on markets is in this case absolutely right: lower rents should be a common public goal.

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

For the POSIWID dorks, the reason people hate developers in Australia isn’t because they build houses, because after all the vast majority of us live in dwellings built by a private developer. It’s because the housing market is geared to stop developers building housing, or rather, it makes buying land and delaying projects until it’s profitable the smart thing to do. A developer is a housing prevention firm.

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

From time to time you hear policies to cap or index rents, either to hard figures, to percentage rises, or to proportions of tenant income (the last two are the policy of the NSW & Australian Greens). I like these, not because I think they’ll work, because IMO they’d only tend to privilege existing tenants, but because they make the payment of rent far more clearly interpretable as a private tax.

liamvhogan, 1 day ago

The NSW Greens’ rent policy is here:

https://greens.org.au/nsw/freezeandcutrents2023

Some is good, some bad, but the most interesting one is the notion of an independent commission to regulate rents ‘like water, energy, public transport and local government rates, …and [as we] regulate the labour market by setting minimum wages’. That’s fascinating!

Rents are unlike all those other commodities because their location so strongly determines the price. An apartment right near Bondi beach is likely to be more expensive than a flat of the same size in the western suburbs, say. A home in the suburbs near schools will be more expensive than a home in an industrial zone under the flight path. That’s quite unlike electricity and water.

A controlled price on rent would have to allow and control those prices—and would allow, in fact require, a kind of industry policy for locations, drawing (or discouraging!) shifts in renting populations.

liamvhogan, 2 days ago

Some statues can be at ground level and will never be touched because of the affection their subjects are held in (Wally Lewis outside Lang Park, Shane Warne outside the MCG). For others no amount of security will protect them.

Every public statue only exists on public sufferance.

liamvhogan, 2 days ago

The Chaser did good in this vein, though it’s a crime the plaque exists at all

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/the-chaser-updates-george-pell-monument-to-accurately-reflect-his-conviction/0aswqynle

liamvhogan, 2 days ago

I would only observe that the placement of the George Pell plaque at knee height on a waist-level wall at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney gives men with weak bladders an opportunity for political speech, the freedom of which is implied in the Australian Constitution

liamvhogan, 2 days ago

@sarae I’ve always wondered if you could approach those equestrian statues in such a way as to leave the horse up. What did the animal do?

liamvhogan, 4 days ago

@jpm cf. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-90s-rock-band-says-about-the-type-of-bored-suburban-dad-you-are-today